By Suzanne Collins
Rating: 4 of 5
Three Word Summary: Love and Death
I will start this review with a spot of praise. The Hunger Games Trilogy saved my life. Or at least helped to preserve it. I recently took a bit of a trip across a significant portion of this fair country (that’s America for our international audiences) in what ended up being a journey of about 28 hours by car. Since I have been known in the past to grow sleepy/unconscious while driving, it will be no surprise to you that my ability to make it from Atlanta to Salt Lake City provided a tiny source of apprehension. Be that as it may, I was determined to make the trip, so I went to work deciding what literary source of excitement would keep me going through the dark nights and the windy days on I-80. After having briefly considered something that would be to me a source of edification (and doom, no doubt) like Remembrance of Things Past, I settled on a trilogy I expected to be somewhat low-brow but essentially exciting and rewarding in its own way. I was not disappointed.
I had expected to switch between the audiobooks, my music, and maybe some radio throughout the course of my trip to keep it mixed up, but it is a real credit to Suzanne Collins’ writing that my dial did not deviate from the audiobook once during the whole first book of the trilogy, stopping only when I got out of my car to pump gas and to find my way into the spooky camp ground outside of Kansas city (Missouri). That was where I, against my parents’ excellent advice, slept in my sleeping bag in a hammock. “Slept” is being generous since the campground’s spookiness derived from the fact that is was absolutely empty since only stupid people sleep in hammocks when it’s -273 °C outside and hurricane winds is too gentle a term to describe what was going on weather-wise. Needless to say, a miserable night’s sleep made driving through Nebraska a particularly nasty experience, but despite my fatigue, Collins kept things gripping with Catching Fire, and I didn’t fall asleep, get blown into a tractor trailer, and die. Thanks Katniss!
The Hunger Games is a love story. It’s a love story with killing, but a love story nonetheless. The books must be understood in this context to fully understand what is going on here. It is not political satire because it’s not smart enough. It’s not psychological thriller because it’s not convincing enough. It’s not pure speculative fiction because it’s not neat enough. This is romance, and highly effective as such. The protagonist, Katniss Everdeen, is likeable enough and usually a source of admiration, but being inside her head makes her difficult to love, which I find to be a source of strength to her dynamic. The two male love interests can be a bit flat at times, but they play their complementary heart-throb parts as unstoppable force and immovable object well enough and I found myself hoping one won out in the end. A strong cast of secondary characters rounds out the relationship dynamics and ends up being one of the liveliest forces in the books, thanks no doubt to Collins’ experience writing for television, where secondary characters lend flesh to the world. The Hunger Games is no different on this count. Notable deviations from rule include the villains, who all come off a bit flat, but very evil.
With the Hunger Games, you get what you signed up for. It is perfect fare for a blockbuster franchise that will make gobs of money but not get talked about a lot at the awards shows. There is no doubt in my mind that I would have been smarter at the end of my trip if I had decided to listen to Remembrance of Things Past. I would also be dead: a splatter on the road. In Nebraska. You get annoying little grammatical mistakes and a couple of plot points raise eyebrows. You also get excitement and effective action sequences. You get characters making decisions as if they were told to perform as certain archetypes, complete with predictable dialogue. You also get invested in the struggles of the characters and genuinely care about their relationships. I experienced this trilogy auditorily, and I would be remiss not to mention the very solid performance of Carolyn McCormick, who read all three books. Her pacing, use of voice, and restraint were a significant piece of the puzzle for me. So if you aren’t writing a doctoral dissertation but you have a tendency to get sleepy in the car, maybe keep a copy of Katniss close. She could save your life.